by James Still
With her own hands, despite Angelica and Rosetta's presence, Lurie fixed us a picnic dinner of cold chicken and homemade bread, sweet potato custard, and lemonade. We ate under a tent we raised under the shade cast by the crepe myrtles. After an hour's nap on pallets on the screened back porch, we played roly-hole marbles, and then Blunt had ready for us bows made of Osage orange limbs and cane arrows, so we played Indians Chasing Sheepherders. Sheepherders were considered the dirt of the earth in Robertson County. Occasionally, Little Jack paused long enough to cry, with me accompanying him in gloom if not in tears.
In late afternoon, Little Jack wanted to walk down the lane to the road, the way Jack and Anson would be coming. He was aware that the return would be far into the night. We might have gone farther had not Blunt whistled at us and motioned us back.
We were asleep again, in my trundle bed, after midnight, when the travelers returned. Again I awakened and learned the trip had been a dry run. No bull had been purchased, for the prices were out of line.
“Did the boy cry?” Jack asked Lurie.
Lurie had to admit that he did. “But only a little,” she said. “They played all day, hardly had a dull moment.”
Jack wrapped his sleeping son in a carriage blanket, declining all invitations to spend the rest of the night, declaring he had to be home at daybreak.
I was sitting up in bed, awake enough to remember that Anson had been remiss in not taking me with him. He picked me up. I swelled up like a toad, like only a neglected boy could.
Hurriedly Lurie complimented me. “Little Jack cried but our boy didn't,” she said.
Anson studied me a moment. “Did you want to cry?” he asked.
I shook my head yes. It couldn't be denied. “You can cry now,” he said.
And I did.
Chinaberry was a place bursting with stories, and there was another that I was told, which deserves to be told now—the story of Irena Kendrick, the sister of Anson's first wife, Melba.
Irena was a year and a day younger than Melba. From infancy their mother had dressed them alike. Dresses, hats, slippers, ribbons. So twinlike many could not tell them apart. You never saw one without the other. Anson became acquainted with them the last two years he attended Bluewater High School. Melba was a classmate, Irena a grade behind. At age sixteen, when all was innocence and fun, Anson “went with” both of them. There was no chance of seeing either alone, their father being as much a stickler in the matter as the mother.
Following graduation, Anson attended Texas A & M for two years, his courses vaguely connected to agricultural science. The Kendrick sisters, the year after Irena's completing high school, attended for a term a finishing school in Armory, Mississippi, from whence their parents had migrated. There they were expected to brush up on Southern manners and decorum, learn a smattering of French, perfect their piano studies—which never did go much further than “Kitten on the Keys”—and be able to cross a room balancing a book on their heads. Lurie, who told me all I ever knew of the Kendricks, said the book should have been put into their heads rather than on top of it.
As had other immigrants, the Kendricks brought with them their own Central Mississippi culture. Too far north to be called Cajuns, too far South to qualify as hillbillies, the Kendricks had not truly left Mississippi. They brought it with them. They had the gazebo, the wide Southern verandah, the hammocks on the lawn, the heavy damask curtains, the straw-matted floors in summer, and the Turkish rugs in winter.
The girls’ voices were soft and alluring to prospective suitors, who found the protectiveness of the parents formidable. They went nowhere except together, and with the chaperoning of the mother or a trusted elder female.
The Kendricks had the only house in the town with hired girls—two of them—to cook, launder, and do anything that, as neighbors believed, might soil Melba's or Irena's hands. This was not totally true. Tolbert Kendrick grew up hard on a farm west of Tupelo. He saw to it that his daughters assisted the hired girls, learned to sew and embroider, and especially to cook. Tolbert, who had become wealthy so suddenly, could not overcome the possibility that his money might vanish as quickly. Even to that day, some twenty-five years having passed, he expected claims against his uncle's estate, which never happened, and he never gave away anything in his life, except a daughter, and he came to regret that. As adverse as he was to relinquishing Melba and Irena to anyone, he saw no other course. He found it hard to accept that his town-raised daughters would be shut away on a farm. He had a built-in distrust of cowboys, real or ex.
During the term Melba and Irena spent at finishing school in Mississippi, their individuality evolved. They never dressed alike again. They no longer looked like twins. And while Melba was pretty, Irena was turning out to be the beauty. But if you were not looking at them, you'd never have known which one was speaking.
Quitting his academic career after two years was a decision made for Anson by Big Jack, his mother said, and Anson probably assented too readily because of the Kendrick girls. Where other suitors found it difficult to approach them, much less to get a date with one, Anson found nothing in his way—except, as events were to bear, he was in love with the both of them. Lurie's brother-in-law had once remarked, “Now if Anson was a Turk and lived in the Ottoman Empire, he could marry both and have it over with,” to which her sister, Velvet, had rejoined, “They could join the Mormons and go live in Salt Lake City.” Lurie had reminded her that the custom of multiple wives had passed.
Which one? was the conundrum of the hour, the day, for several years. It seemed a dilemma without resolution, but Tolbert Kendrick was too hardheaded an individual not to solve it.
Telephones were by now growing out from Bluewater and sprouting across the empty landscape, crossing county lines, linking up isolated farms and ranches, shrinking the desolation. Which one? became a taunting question in the minds of many a housewife who never saw a Winters or a Kendrick, and perhaps never would. But now they could be talked about, even though a call to Austin or San Antonio or Amarillo would go through one try in five times.
Before the news could be fairly digested or fully believed that Irena was dating a clerk in her father's hardware store, the word was that Anson had married Melba and they had gone to live at Chinaberry. It was firmly believed, and probably true, that Tolbert Kendrick had asked his younger daughter to step aside in favor of her elder sister. A few dates with the clerk, and then no more. Nobody expected her to “marry down” socially. Further proof that Tolbert Kendrick was making up Anson's mind for him. Tolbert was accepting the inevitable.
Two things happened: Irena was seen in Bluewater no more, except for infrequent visits. When anybody made bold to ask, the reply was, “Oh, she's here and there; Irena has a will of her own.” As for Lurie, she had departed for her parents’ home and her brother's, and no connection was made. Lurie's love for Anson Winters was, as her sister would note, the best-kept secret on the prairie.
When her sister died, Irena came home and stayed, and people considered her arrival no riddle. After a year, a proper interval of mourning, Anson would marry Irena. But they did not reckon with Tolbert Kendrick. The loss of his daughter had been an unacceptable blow. And then there was the affected child to care for. He had sacrificed one daughter and would not give up another.
And they did not reckon with Anson's mother. Was the affliction visited upon Little Johnnes hereditary? There had been no incident of it among her people in memory, or in Big Jack's family, so far as she could find out. In the Bluewater Cemetery there were two small graves beside that of Tolbert Kendrick's uncle's wife. The dates indicated the mother had not died in childbirth, yet both children had passed away before their second birthday. The doctor who might have attended them was long deceased. Discreet questioning by the cook at Towerhouse, who knew everybody in Bluewater, as well as the skeletons in their closets, turned up nothing.
The Bluewater undertaker was in his earlier fifties and revealed nothing, but it was revealed tha
t his father, from whom he had inherited the mortuary, was still alive, in his nineties, residing with a daughter in Tyler. Bronson was sent as emissary to investigate. Yes, he had sold coffins for all three of the deceased members of the Kendrick family, had dug the graves and helped bury them, as he had for every Bluewater citizen of the day. He remembered the Kendricks and the two afflicted children—two born in sequence.
Thus was the star-crossed marriage to falter despite apparent certainty. Anson's mother and Irena's father were in agreement that the ceremony should never take place, and for different reasons. The father of Melba had sacrificed one daughter and would not risk another. It may be he hadn't an inkling of the Winters family's objection.
Lurie had been away a year and had returned. Nobody save her sister saw a connection. Lurie had an acceptable suitor, a premedical student at the University of Texas, who was her age to the month. She was twenty-six, and by definition of the times, a bit up in years to be unmarried.
Since their marriage, Lurie had never let the names of the two sisters cross her lips in conversation with Anson. The subject was too sore in her heart. She believed that Irena had told him she would never have children, else he would have disregarded all wishes and warnings. Unthinkable. A childless household on the desolate plains of Texas. Yet Anson and Lurie had been married close to three years and had none of their own.
I was their child.
Lurie accounted it significant that Anson never married, or was known to keep female company, until after Irena had married.
While away for a year in Mississippi, Irena had completed a course in bookkeeping, and on returning home, she had taken employment in the circuit clerk's office. Remaining the prettiest and the best-dressed girl in Bluewater, she eventually married the divorced son of the county judge, a lawyer, who sometimes pleaded cases in his father's court. She had been married for four years, and the lack of offspring confirmed to Lurie the correctness of her judgment. Irena intended to remain childless, with the remedy that she had the care of two children from her husband's former marriage.
All of this revelation came to my ears in bits and pieces. Unmentioned were two things that were palpable yet unspoken: Lurie had not given him a child, and in his love life, she was number three.
High winds were tearing the clouds to rags. To the southwest, a band of clouds, low-lying and lumpy like the Buckalew Mountains back home, as black as the earth of Chinaberry farm, stretched halfway up the sky and were rendered the darker by the cotton fields below.
It had been a day of both sun and cloud, and the cotton pickers were grateful for any respite from the heat. Occasional streaks of lightning pierced the clouds, too far away for the accompanying thunder to be heard. The pickers, taking advantage of the intermittent shade, ate their dinner hurriedly, skipped the siesta, and returned to the fields.
In mid-afternoon, when rolls of thunder sounding like a wagon over a cobbled road warned of approaching rain, the pickers fled for shelter. They had been in the fields since four that morning. Dark in the minds of all was the tornado that had wiped out a family of four on lands the Bent Y Ranch now leased, some ten miles from Chinaberry.
Anson had shown me the cellar of that family's house one day when we had gone out to check on the windmill. There was the cellar hole but not one remaining plank of house or outbuilding. Anson told me of their deaths in the twister, and I gazed at the cellar, recreating that night of terror and death. He said that a man, woman, and two infants had been snatched from their beds in the night, sucked into the vortex of a whirling wind, flung to their death without a moment to cry out to the Almighty. Seeing that I was now trembling, he picked me up. “Let's go,” he said, and carried me back to the truck.
The telephone rang shortly after two o'clock. The operator in Bluewater did not usually take switchboard calls when there was lightning. Wire attracted bolts of electricity, with possibly dire results. But the insistent ringing caused her to risk it. Lurie answered with trepidation. Anson was calling about the weather, and to say he would be coming home early. Knowing about a traumatic experience two years before at my Uncle John's in Alabama, he believed his coming offered reassurance. He had witnessed that the darkening of the daytime sky caused me to tremble.
Angelica and Rosetta were canning pears in the backyard. They had packed the jars and screwed on the lids, and the jars were sitting on a wire rack in the oversized iron wash pot, being cooked and sterilized over a managed fire. With the first roll of thunder, they fled to the Martinez family's storm cellar, leaving their grandfather to tend the fire, wait out the cooking, lift the Mason jars out with tongs, and store them in the smokehouse. Then, as the wind rose, he secured all washtubs, buckets, and pans that might blow away. The storm pit at Chinaberry was between the garden fence and one of the cotton houses, now filled to the rafters. The pit was empty, except for flowerpots stacked on a shelf.
Back home, our storm cellar had been used in winter to keep pots of Wandering Jew and fern below the frost line, and we called it our flower pit. Sweet potatoes and turnips and green tomatoes were also buried there in pine straw.
At age five, I had stood with my mother and sisters at a back window and watched a twister cross our land, doing no harm. A cyclone had crossed Uncle Bob's farm, too, and I recall the fallen timber where it had swept clear a path a hundred yards wide. Every cyclone season brought news of barn roofs lifted, chicken houses blown away, telephone lines down. But the tornado that struck western Chambers County and devastated adjoining West Point, Georgia, was one with more serious consequences.
We had gone there in our Model T Ford to spend a Sunday at my Uncle John's. The home of my Uncle John and Aunt Claude and their eight children was an antebellum structure, two stories high, with lofty ceilings and a porch all the way around, supported in front by square columns. The kitchen and dining room were connected by a roofed-over corridor, thirty yards to the rear.
Shortly after dinner, we had gathered on the porch and were listening to a roar from the southeast, too loud and near to be the Atlanta and West Point train passing. Though the sky had glazed over with clouds, there was no particular threat of rain. Other than the roar, there was an ominous stillness. Not a tree branch stirred.
And suddenly the tornado was upon us. Shingles flew about us like leaves. There was no time to reach the storm pit. Hardly were we inside and the doors fastened than the house lifted and settled back on its foundation, bereft of its top story. The porch was ripped off in front, along with the square pillars, the swing left hanging. I recall that a picture was swinging out from the wall over my head. The kitchen and dining room were intact. In the pitch-blackness of the stormy night that followed, bodies were dug from the ruins of the West Point railroad station.
I studied on this memory very much on this day at Chinaberry when the sky looked similar. But directly after Anson called, the clouds dispersed, the sun came out, and although the horizon remained dark toward the southwest, the cotton pickers returned to the fields. They would remain there until last light, at nine, when you can see cotton and nothing else. Angelica and Rosetta came back to hang out clothes from the wringer to dry. Blunt took the precaution to clear out the plunder in the storm cellar and lay down a groundsheet, and with the help of Angelica and Rosetta, he lugged the half-sized mattress from the screened porch to the pit.
Anson arrived home in bright sunlight, the air cooled by a distant rainfall, perhaps hail. Hail the size of hen eggs was known to fall at times. I met him at the mailbox and was cheered that day by a letter from home. I had now been away from home several weeks, and my homesickness was often sharp and often dull. Mama was saying nothing concerning my protracted stay. She left that to Papa, whose letters to Ernest dwelt on this subject alone.
When Anson arrived, we immediately went for a ride on Blue, whom Blunt already had prepared, always anticipating Anson and knowing what he wanted. We took a trot on Old Blue to the back of the pasture. Lurie went with us, which she didn't always do.
A town girl, Lurie had failed to develop a pleasure in horseback riding, and it was the single activity she did not always agree to when Anson urged her to join him. The ride we took that day, I was to recall later, was the last she had, and the last to which Anson invited her. Lurie rode sidesaddle, by choice rather than by adherence to the custom of the day. At home, on the rare occasions we boys rode in from the field with my father, we sat behind him, holding to his belt for balance. But Anson had settled me in front, a left arm lightly holding me for security.
That day we rode to the backside of the farm, the fields brown and bare from a second picking. We sauntered past a later planting, these fields at their peak of opening, with a white cloud settling to earth and reaching to the dying sky. The sun was setting behind a cloud, and to rural wisdom this meant that bad weather could be expected. The air was unusually cool, so cool that the male pickers had put on their shirts. The women, who were as tan as they were ever to be, and with no fear of freckles, had unrolled their sleeves.
The pickers glanced up and smiled and did not stop. Their arms flew from bolls to sack. Blunt was among them, and while his right hand delivered a boll of cotton to the canvas sack he dragged along the row, his left was snatching another. Any good picker worked with both hands, as one might milk a cow, both hands going like pistons. Blunt always joined his family in the fields when he could. No one required or asked for this labor due to his age, but as he considered the cotton farm his high responsibility, nobody could talk him out of continuing to pick. He could pick an average of fifty pounds a day, quite a feat.